McConnell: We'll Use Purse Power to 'Restrain' Executive Amnesty

28 Oct 2014

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) vowed to “restrain” and “push back against” any executive orders by the president to grant work permits to illegal immigrants “by trying to control the amount of money that is allocated” if the Republicans take over the Senate on Tuesday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.

Asked about the prospect of the president granting work permits via an executive order, he said “I think it’s a bad mistake…if the American people do change the Senate and give the Republicans control of the Congress, we certainly are, through the spending process, going to try to restrain the overactive bureaucracy that’s been attacking virtually every business in America and is the reason for this slow growth, and we intend to push back against executive orders that we think aren’t warranted by trying to control the amount of money that is allocated.” And “we’re going to do what we can in Congress to try to restrain activities that we think are a mistake, and I certainly think a whole lot of unilateral executive branch-only actions in the immigration field is a mistake.”

On Obamacare, McConnell stated “obviously, he’s [Obama’s] not going to sign a full repeal, but there are pieces of it that are extremely unpopular with the American public that the senate ought to have a chance to vote on, repealing the medical device tax, trying to restore the 40-hour workweek, voting on whether or not we should continue the individual mandate, which people hate, detest and despise.”

He added that a full repeal “would take 60 votes in the Senate. Nobody thinks we’re going to have 60 Republicans, and it would take a presidential signature. No one thinks we’re going to get that. So, the question is what can you do about it? well, I’d like to put the Senate Democrats in the position of voting on the most unpopular parts of this law and see if we can put it on the president’s desk and make him take real ownership of this highly destructive Obamacare, which has done so much damage to the country, the lost jobs, the higher premiums, the higher co-payments, the higher deductibles. Yeah, we’ll be voting on that sort of thing, but he is the president of the United States until January of 2017, and people need to understand that that constrains our ability to do for this law what we’d like to do, which is get rid of it.”